Chapter 280: Arrest III

"Okay," she said. "Good."

She walked past him toward the exit and he let her go and watched her push through the main door into the Monday afternoon.

Business Insight ran its quiet reading of her and found someone who was starting to figure out what the next part of her life looked like without the weight of two months pressing on it, which was the right thing to be figuring out.

He sent her a text fifteen minutes later.

The welfare office has a counselling referral list. Ask them specifically about the trauma support pathway not just the legal one.

She replied after a while.

I already asked. They gave me a number.

Good, he said.

Why do you know about trauma support pathways, she said.

I know about a lot of things, he said.

I know, she said. And then: Thank you. For. Whatever you actually did.

He put his phone in his pocket.

======================

Olivia called at eight.

He answered sitting at his desk with the whiteboard visible and the city outside doing its Monday evening version of itself.

"Okay," she said, before he could say anything. "Tell me the actual version. Not the text version."

"The text version was accurate," he said.

"The text version was four lines," said Olivia. "I want the forty-line version."

"There isn’t one," he said. "Fraud documentation, attorney with a ninety-one percent conviction rate, charges filed, arrest followed from the charges."

"Ninety-one percent," she said.

"Yes," he said.

"You hired someone with a ninety-one percent conviction rate," said Olivia.

"I was referred to someone with a ninety-one percent conviction rate," he said. "By Elena Voss."

"Elena your property lawyer."

"Elena who knows attorneys," he said.

Olivia was quiet for a moment. He could hear her moving around, the specific sound of her apartment in the evening, something that might have been Yuna’s voice in another room.

"How much did it cost," she said.

"Olivia," he said.

"I know you’re going to say that’s not important," she said. "I’m asking anyway because I want to understand the scale of the thing you did."

He told her the retainer figure.

She was quiet for a longer moment than usual.

"That’s," she started. Then: "That’s a very significant amount of money."

"Yes," he said.

"For someone who hurt someone who hurt you," she said. The same thing she’d said Friday. She said it differently this time. Not skeptical. Trying to understand something.

"For someone who hurt a person who couldn’t make it stop on her own," he said. "The connection to me doesn’t change the math on what Anthony Ruiz did."

Another pause.

"I know," said Olivia. "I know it doesn’t. I just. Sometimes the way you think about things makes me stop." She paused. "Not in a bad way. In a way where I need a second to catch up."

"Take your time," he said.

"I always do," she said. "You’re very patient about that."

"You catch up fast," he said. "And you usually land somewhere more accurate than where you started."

She was quiet for a moment.

"That’s possibly the nicest thing you’ve said to me this week," she said.

"I said you were beautiful on stage three weeks ago," he said.

"That was about my appearance," she said. "This is about how my brain works. These are different categories."

He almost smiled.

"How was Yuna today," he said.

"Insufferable and wonderful in the specific Yuna way," said Olivia. "She has a new theory that the seanmillerappreciation account is bringing good energy to the group because three good things happened in the same week she started it and she’s tracking the correlation. I told her correlation isn’t causation. She said I was being a scientist in a space that required being a poet."

"She’s not wrong about that distinction," said Sean.

"Don’t tell her that," said Olivia. "I’ll never hear the end of it." A pause. "Sean."

"Yeah."

"Are you actually okay," she said. "Not strategy okay. Actual okay."

He sat with that for a moment.

The honest version of the answer.

"Something unfinished felt finished today," he said. "That’s different from happy. But it’s good."

She thought about that. "Like when a song resolves," she said.

"I don’t know enough about music to confirm that," he said.

"It’s when the melody has been building tension," she said, "and you get the chord that makes it make sense. You don’t always notice you needed it until it arrives." A pause. "That’s what I mean."

He looked at the whiteboard.

The four lines. Fischer. Round parameters. Thursday. Three weeks.

"Yeah," he said. "Exactly like that."

"Good," said Olivia. "Regular evening number three is Saturday. I’m still not telling you what I planned."

"I’m not asking," he said.

"You’re curious," she said.

"I’m very curious," he said. "I’m not asking."

"That’s remarkable restraint," said Olivia. "Goodnight Sean."

"Goodnight," he said.

He put his phone down.

Looked at the window.

His phone buzzed one more time. Not Olivia.

Max.

Amara says the oversight body called back. They want a second conversation. She spent three hours today adding to her notes. She now has thirty-one pages. A pause. She keeps saying she just needed someone to ask. She’s been saying that for two days now. Another pause. I think she means she needed to know it would actually go somewhere. That someone would read it and do something rather than file it.

Sean typed back: Tell her it went somewhere.

She knows, said Max. That’s why she has thirty-one pages. She’s making sure the next person who asks has even more to work with.

Sean looked at that.

He looked at the whiteboard.

He thought about a girl who had kept a notebook for two months. About an attorney who took cases because they needed to be won. About thirty-one pages written from a recovery bed by someone who had spent two years waiting for the right thread.

He thought about Anthony Ruiz at seven forty on a Monday morning.

He thought about Rebecca walking out of the welfare office and asking simply if someone had actually done something.

He uncapped the marker.

He looked at what was written.

Then he added one thing below the four lines.

Anthony — done.

He capped the marker.